Know Thyself 23 



longing here. Galileo, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Torre- 

 celli, Giordano Bruno, and Rene Descartes might have 

 seen Shakespeare act, had it been customary then for 

 companies to which he belonged to tour continental 

 Europe; and Francis Bacon and William Harvey may 

 have actually seen him at the English court. Going 

 only a trifle outside of Shakespeare's lifetime, the very 

 year that baby Will's little lungs filled with air for 

 the first time, Andreas Vesalius died a hungry outcast* 

 because of his offense in proving that if man would 

 really know himself, one source of his knowledge must 

 be the dissection of the dead human body. And "these 

 bones" of the great author of his own epitaph were 

 scarcely settled to their long rest before the mothers 

 of Isaac Newton, John Boyle, John Mayow, Marcello 

 Malpighi, John Ray, and Antony van Leeuwenhoeck 

 had given birth to the baby sons destined to develop 

 into these notable men. 



Entering now a little further into the historical side 

 of our subject, I ask you to recall the conditions under 

 which Socrates took the exhortation, Know Thyself, as 

 the text of his life-long sermonizing to his fellow 

 Athenians. For a century before Socrates, the atmos- 

 phere of the little community was charged with specu- 

 lation about the mode of origin of the world. We re- 

 call how a single, simple primal world-stuff as the basis 

 of everything was a self-evident proposition to the 

 Ionian school, while a thorough-going multiplicity or 

 pluralism seemed equally certain to another school, the 



